Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Wobble

As I'm going along I often wonder how it is we stay up on these things. I've read a bit on this but even what appears to be the simplest of articles soon turns into headache inducing jibberish. Words like centrifugal and angular momentum and rake and gyroscope and planar and vector appear. These are usually followed by things that some people on the planet can understand.
Things like:

0 = Cfriction x V x P + Cair x v^2 x v - Cslope x P x% slope x V

And they go on for pages with illustrations and graphs.

I don't know any of those people.

When my mind contemplates these things I usually get disoriented and wobbly. Not the old kind of disoriented and wobbly but the kind that strikes you suddenly like you've just walked into a bike shop and two tatootools are having a conversation and you notice that neither are using words like "sick" and "dude" and "awesome".

There are few things worse than the wobble. Only two things can happen, you either regain control or you don't. So it strikes me as peculiar that someone would build a bike so they can get on with their wobble.



They say it only takes a couple of minutes to get used to. My question is how many fall down go boom's are included in those few minutes. I'm not fond of the fall down go boom way of riding and as one of the Laws of Old states, once you reach a certain age if you fall you're not allowed to get up without the aid of a good samaritan (are there bad samaritans?). I haven't reached that age yet but it's unclear at what point that kicks in so I see no reason to push my luck.
After you master the wobble bike you'll be able to ride it anywhere. I can ride my regular bike anywhere and choose when to wobble. All I need to do is think about angular momentum and vectors.

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